In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican
candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old
daughter, Bristol,
was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the
reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that
John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor
of the Republican Convention, in St.
Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed,
or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, "Like so many other
American families who are in the same situation, I think it's great that she
instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off
someplace and have an abortion." A Mississippi
delegate claimed that "even though young children are making that decision to
become pregnant, they've also decided to take responsibility for their actions
and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child."
Palin's family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many
socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of
evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, "There
hasn't been one evangelical family that hasn't gone through some sort of
situation." In fact, it was Popma's own "crisis pregnancy" that had brought her
into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls
to treat Bristol Palin's pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it
have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America's dominant political
divide. Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex
education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers
have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as
devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally
advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are
relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't
choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have
recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a
sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin,
published a startling book called "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the
Lives of American Teenagers," and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section
titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex." His findings are drawn from a national survey that
Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred
thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of
adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good
indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that
this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as
evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents--seventy-four
per cent--say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only
half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in
abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins
are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most
likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for
them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an
unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health
data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline
Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their
"sexual début"--to use the festive term of social-science researchers--shortly
after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants
begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is
that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other
groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among
the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that
they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are
steeped in the abstinence movement's warnings that condoms won't actually
protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus
found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek
guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using
contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active
youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another
trusted adult consistently use protection.

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes
apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements.
Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people
have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so
under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring
Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop
stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses
exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until
the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges--which,
unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian--end
up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The
movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay
sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet,
according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah
Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates
of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they
perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or
it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break
the pledge.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar
dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically
collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an
embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed
chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile
formula, it's hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the
self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it's
Sodom and Gomorrah.

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in
behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on
measures of religiosity--such as how often they go to church, or how often they
pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and
who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren't deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus
argues, is how "embedded" a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and
institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a
plausible alternative to America's sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of
course, isn't the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit
families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents
are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say
that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have
fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

A terrific 2005 documentary, "The Education of Shelby Knox,"
tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock,
Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth
pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for
comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only
education, but, Knox says, "maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the
hall pregnant." In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but
less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent
mind and the kind of parents who--despite their own conservative leanings--admire
her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around
town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter
started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby's efforts,
because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don't
acknowledge "reality."

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a
world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and
they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from
families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled
until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, "In such an
atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive)
while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and
norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt." Symbolic commitment
to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating--hence
the drive to outlaw gay marriage--but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the
institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in
practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of
George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri
at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that "red
families" and "blue families" are "living different lives, with different moral
imperatives." (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less
important than the higher concentration of "moral-values voters" in red
states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada,
Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election);
those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New
Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi,
New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New
Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). "The ‘blue
states' of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher
use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage," Cahn
and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red
states--in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned
pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal
difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest
median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all
red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York,
Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at
greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are
significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger
couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a
marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after,
the wedding.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules--messily
divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay
sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, "the
paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes
sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical
period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and
experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to
experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach
emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at
all) as their lives are stabilizing."

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to
class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct
"middle-class morality" taking shape among economically and socially advantaged
families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus's survey, the teen-agers
who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of
contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
Regnerus writes, "They are interested in remaining free from the burden of
teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted
diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college,
advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake.
Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks." These are the kids who tend to
score high on measures of "strategic orientation"--how analytical, methodical,
and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see
abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before
marriage--just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in
favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining "technical
virgins" but because they assess it as a safer option. "Solidly middle- or
upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational
expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities' lifestyles,"
Regnerus writes. "They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious,
tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about
expressing their nascent sexuality." They might have loved Ellen Page in
"Juno," but in real life they'd see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic
derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex
has become "a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt.
It's not just unwise anymore; it's wrong."

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks--in
the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where
infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to
the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of
educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue
that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms--producing high
rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other
dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In "Forbidden
Fruit," Regnerus offers an "unscientific postscript," in which he advises
social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to
chastity and to marriage, they'll need to do more to help young couples stay
married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister,
recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, "Evangelicals are fighting gay
marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has
already broken it down." Conservatives may need to start talking as much about
saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.

"Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is
unreasonable," Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that
advocate chastity should "work more creatively to support younger marriages.
This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social
norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and
sustain early family formation."

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the
contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby
Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines
intercourse as "what two dogs do out on the street corner--they just bump and
grind awhile, boom boom boom." Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young
people, "Every Young Woman's Battle," by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen
Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of
innocent souls: "physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond
description." Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person
to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy
young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book "Real Sex: The Naked Truth
About Chastity," writes, "Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding
and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade
ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences
if we do get married." Teenagers and single adults are "told over and over not
to have sex, but no one ever encourages" them "to be bodily or sensual in some
appropriate way"--getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do
through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about
something like food. Winner goes on, "This doesn't mean, of course, that if
only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the
chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate
ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well--so that unmarried
folks can still be bodily people, even though they're not having sex, and so
that married people can give themselves to sex freely."

Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at
teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. "Every
Young Woman's Battle," for example, tells teen-agers that "the momentary
relief" of "self-gratification" can lead to "shame, low self-esteem, and fear
of what others might think or that something is wrong with you." And it won't
slake sexual desire: "Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites
grow bigger and they want MORE! It's better not to feed such a monster in the
first place."

Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex
education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it's
possible to "believe in abstinence in a religious sense," but still understand
that abstinence-only education is dangerous "for students who simply are not
abstaining." As Knox's approach makes clear, you don't need to break out the
sex toys to teach sex ed--you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all
kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new "abstinence-plus"
curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing
accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have
sex anyway. "Abstinence works," Knox said at the hearing.
"Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not."

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the
cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is
so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged
to declare herself a "secondary" or "born-again" virgin. That's not an idea,
surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

The "pro-family" efforts of social conservatives--the
campaigns against gay marriage and abortion--do nothing to instill the
emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others
often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals,
but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social
liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and
teen sexuality--indeed, they may feel that it's unseemly or judgmental to do
so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe
these choices weren't originally about values--maybe they were about maximizing
education and careers--yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only
do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples
fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment,
regardless of their parents' economic circumstances. The new middle-class
culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it's pretty
successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And
its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see
child-rearing as a project for which they're not yet ready. For too long, the
conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of
family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous
selfishness. This isn't true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point
that out.

Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the
failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In "The Education of Shelby
Knox," for example, Shelby's father is uncomfortable, at first, with his
daughter's campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its
local youth pastor tells Shelby, "You ask me sometimes why I look at you a
little funny. It's because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance." But as her
father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply
hasn't worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are
having sex, and having babies that they can't support. As Shelby's father
declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy "is a problem--a major,
major problem that everybody's just shoving under the rug."